ego are thus compacted together. It is in the variety and delicacy of
these combinations and all that they imply, far more than in the
elements of which they are composed, that man rises farthest above the
higher animals; and of these powers later adolescence is the golden
age. The aimless and archaic movements of infancy, whether massive and
complex or in the form of isolated automatic tweaks or twinges, are
thus, by slow processes of combined analysis and synthesis, involving
changes as radical as any in all the world of growth, made over into
habits and conduct that fit the world of present environment.

But, thirdly, this long process carried out with all degrees of
completeness may be arrested at any unfinished stage. Some automatisms
refuse to be controlled by the will, and both they and it are often
overworked. Here we must distinguish constantly between (1) those
growing rankly in order to be later organized under the will, and (2)
those that have become feral after this domestication of them has lost
power from disease or fatigue, and (3) those that have never been
subjugated because the central power that should have used them to
weave the texture of willed action--the proper language of complete
manhood--was itself arrested or degenerate. With regard to many of
these movements these distinctions can be made with confidence, and in
some children more certainly than in others. In childhood, before
twelve, the efferent patterns should be developed into many more or
less indelible habits, and their colors set fast. Motor specialties
requiring exactness and grace like piano-playing, drawing, writing,
pronunciation of a foreign tongue, dancing, acting, singing, and a
host of virtuosities, must be well begun before the relative arrest of
accessory growth at the dawn of the ephebic regeneration and before
its great afflux of strength. The facts seem to show that children of
this age, such as Hancock[10] described, who could not stand with feet